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Available for over a year

In this series for ��ѿ��ý Sounds and ��ѿ��ý Radio 4, best-selling author and scholar Katherine Rundell celebrates the lives of twenty astonishing but endangered animals. Each short essay includes stories that connect natural history with cultural insight, myth and science - revealing how animals have shaped human imagination, and how our choices now shape their survival. In this episode, Katherine introduces us to Lulu, a black potbellied pig who once saved a human’s life - a reminder of the pig’s intelligence. We learn that pigs can distinguish between different types of music, and some have even learned to play video games. The largest pig on record was Big Bill, who weighed 1,100kg - as much as a VW Beetle with a lion inside. But their size can also make them dangerous: in 14th-century Normandy, one was tried and sentenced in a court of law for killing a child. Despite their strength and intelligence, some pig species are now critically endangered. One of them, the Visayan Warty Pig, has piglets with go-faster stripes along their backs and adults with extravagant bouffant hair. The pig may even be the subject of the world’s oldest known animal art - a 45,000-year-old cave painting of the Sulawesi Warty Pig, now listed as near-threatened. Whether it survives another 45,000 years - or even another hundred - is up to us. Written and Presented by Katherine Rundell Produced by Natalie Donovan for ��ѿ��ý Audio in Bristol